Under the Claiborne Expressway
The failure of the federal Democratic coalition to protect the health and improve the mobility of those harmed by freeways
Last December, I visited New Orleans, LA for eight days to attend the AGU Fall Meeting. I presented air pollution research (my job?), met other scientists and spent the weekend afterwards exploring the city with friends. I thoroughly enjoyed spending a bit of time each day to see the cultural landmarks, eateries, bars and live music that make New Orleans a lively and unruly city. The hostel where I stayed was on Canal Street, putting me within walking distance of the French Quarter, Frenchmen Street and St. Roch Cemetery No. 1 among other attractions. On Thursday morning of the conference, I decided to walk for 15 minutes to Claiborne Avenue. Located in the Tremé neighborhood, the oldest Black neighborhood in the United States, this avenue was once lined with magnificent oak trees and hundreds of Black-owned businesses.
In the 1960s, like in cities across the United States, transportation planners targeted and destroyed the homes, businesses and parks along Claiborne Avenue through the construction of the Claiborne Expressway or I-10, an elevated intraurban freeway. This decision was violent and racist. People who live near intraurban freeways are unsurprisingly exposed to elevated levels of traffic-related air pollution (TRAP) like particulate matter (PM), metals and nitrogen oxides. Diesel PM, emitted from trucks that traverse almost every American freeway, is particularly dangerous to human health and was identified by the State of California as a toxic air pollutant in 1998. Diesel PM is comprised of black carbon (soot), along with 40 known cancerous organic compounds. A Louisiana State University report noted that the Claiborne Corridor was ranked in the worst 10 percent for diesel PM and worst 3 percent for traffic proximity and volume in the United States per the USEPA National Air Toxins Assessment. A higher percentage of minority residents (75%, compared to 41% in Louisiana and 38% in the US) and low-income residents (63%, compared to 40% in Louisiana and 34% in the US) live in the Claiborne Corridor.
I read about the Claiborne Expressway at the beginning of 2021 when the Biden-Harris administration and the Democratic coalition in Congress were negotiating their infrastructure proposals: the blandly named “American Jobs Plan”, paired with the Americans Families Plan, which eventually morphed into the doomed Build Back Better Act. I was optimistic to hear that the Reconnecting Communities Act was included in the first version of the American Jobs Plan, which would create a $25 billion dollar program to begin to dismantle the intraurban freeways built to destroy communities of color and segregate American cities. To advertise the infrastructure bill, President Biden and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigeig specifically highlighted the Claiborne Expressway as a quintessential example of an intraurban freeway that divides a community of color and should be removed to begin to undo the decades of harm it caused (and continues to cause).
I set out from my hostel and walked down Canal Street past the St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 until I was at the freeway overpass, which loomed overhead. I wanted to walk under the middle of the elevated roadway to get a sense for how much public land between the divided neighborhood could be reclaimed for green space, housing, businesses and the like. It was difficult to cross the ground-level streets parallel to the overpass. Unlike in Berkeley, where there was a decent chance when I stepped out into a crosswalk cars would stop, I was given no such deference by motorists traveling 40 miles per hour towards the on-ramp. I instead waited patiently at the signaled crosswalks.
As planned, the lanes of traffic above and at street-level dissuaded me from crossing from one side of Tremé to the other. The economist and urbanist Jane Jacobs described places like these in cities as “border vacuums”: urban land near a transportation corridor where public street life (e.g., children playing, people walking across town) struggles or does not exist. As I stood under the Claiborne Expressway, the car and truck traffic thundered overhead, the air smelled of engine exhaust and little sunlight reached the ground before me. I began walking northeast on the centerline of the freeway, engulfed in darkness on a sunny day.
The land underneath freeway overpasses is often occupied by parked vehicles, tractor trailers and the homes of unhoused people. We design our cities (with hostile infrastructure) and enforce a social hierarchy (with militarized, white supremacist police) that forces many unhoused people to live in unpleasant, polluted and noisy public places like under freeways. In the Bay Area and Los Angeles, where number of homes does not support the number of residents, many unhoused people live in tents, RVs or other structures on the land beneath and adjacent to freeways. Capitalists see little value in the land except as surface parking lots, which we should abolish from cities and rezone for homes, parks, etc. Government invests little resources in these places beyond the car-dependent infrastructure which is very expensive (think of how much concrete and steal comprises those massive columns and wide road decks). Sometimes, public transport stations (e.g., MacArthur or Rockridge BART) are a destination for transit riders underneath a freeway (albeit accompanied by parking).
Being under the Claiborne Expressway was somewhat familiar to me in this sense, as someone who has walked and biked underneath freeways in Oakland, San Francisco and Minneapolis-St. Paul. At 11 am on this sunny Thursday morning, I saw the homes of unhoused folks (i.e., tents and colorful school buses), parked cars and mostly empty asphalt lots. As I approached the Lafitte Greenway, a pedestrian and bicycle trail that runs perpendicular to the Expressway, a group of tables and a food stand caught my attention against the concrete backdrop of the roadway, sidewalks, columns and elevated roadway deck. I snapped a photograph of the scene (below).
As I took the photograph, I noticed the person behind the counter wave me over. I again crossed the street with caution (by dodging cars) and introduced myself to Ariella, the person behind the counter of Froot Orleans, a subtle fruit and smoothie parlor. We introduced ourselves to each other, both shouting to be heard. Given how unpleasant it was for me to cross the multiple lanes of speeding vehicle traffic to reach the stand, I asked Ariella who the typical cliental were. She replied that Froot Orleans served regulars, tourists, neighborhood children and the unhoused people living nearby. Ariella mentioned Froot Orleans had been at that location for a few years and in the Tremé neighborhood for eight years. I ordered a smoothie and thanked her kindly for the conversation.
I continued to walk under the centerline of the expressway. The current design of Claiborne Avenue is hostile to anyone not in a vehicle and deadly to at least one cyclist (see the white “ghost” bike below and note the terribly narrow curb cuts). I took some time to imagine how the land under the Claiborne Expressway might return to a transit-oriented boulevard, with ample public space and parks populated once again by Oak tress. The Claiborne Avenue Alliance has an interactive model of how such a boulevard might look and where new parcels of land could be reclaimed into the urban form. Froot Orleans, for example, would sit at the intersection of a miles long park and the Lafitte Greenway. The nearby roadways could be redesigned to reduce vehicle speeds (narrower lanes) and include improved curb cuts, raised crosswalks and protected bicycle lanes. A bus lane for the 51, 52, 57 and 80 bus lines would improve mobility of nearby residents and the service for all. A visit to Froot Orleans would be an easy walk/transit ride for locals and tourists alike. Back in reality, I was inspired to see that despite the inhospitable border vacuum below the expressway, a fruit parlor that serves the neighborhood children and the unhoused thrives, just as the Tremé community does.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the US Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development issued the City of New Orleans a $2 million grant to fund the Claiborne Corridor Study to assess the feasibility and community sentiment towards reconnecting the Tremé neighborhood. The study estimated it would cost $300 million to tear down the Expressway and projected high traffic volumes of both cars and trucks now at street-level. Residents at the time were split as to whether the Claiborne Expressway should be removed. Airbnbs were increasing in the neighborhood due to its adjacency to the French Quarter and many worried that the removal of the freeway would lead to higher property taxes and further “environmental” gentrification and displacement. Others preferred the $300 million be spent on transportation, better jobs and stormwater management. Ultimately, the elevated roadway remained in place.
In the long term, I suspect the Expressway will only slow the displacement of Tremé residents. Reckdahl notes that many residents work in gig or tourism jobs that provide inadequate pay, have little opportunity for advancement and do not provide healthcare or benefits. The cost of housing in American cities continues to rise. Without the rapid construction of infill housing (i.e. upzoning), housing supply constraints lead to gentrification and the displacement of low- and middle-class people from their homes. The government also fails to provide reliable public transportation systems to Tremé residents. In response, the Claiborne Corridor Cultural Innovation District Master Plan proposed “circulators”, neighborhood vehicles driven by health outreach workers to ferry residents to doctors appointments. While these circulators partially address the mobility needs of residents, a robust solution to provide Tremé residents the mobility they deserve would be to invest in more expansive, safe and reliable public transport and (e)bike shares.
The capital costs of public transportation systems and governance of the interstate freeway system requires federal legislation like the Reconnecting Communities Act to fund any meaningful removal of intraurban freeways and the expansion of public transport systems. Generally, municipal and state governments do not collect enough revenue to make the necessary infrastructure changes to the urban form of American cities to provide urban dwellers mobility without the use of a private automobile. In its current state, I have little faith the United States Congress would pursue such programs.
The United States Senate has an anti-democratic design (i.e. two senators per state, regardless of population) and is steeped in white supremacy (e.g., the filibuster). In the current 50-50 Senate to pass both the American Jobs and Families Plans would have required the passage of a budget or “reconciliation” bill along party lines or by getting the votes of 10 senators in the Republican coalition. The latter option is a fallacy. The Republican coalition in Washington now consisted primarily of fascists and seditionists who only a few months before the introduction of the infrastructure bills led a violent coup to overthrow our flawed democracy. Their political movement is based in white supremacy, obstructionism, militarism and corporatism. Republicans have no interest in governing to improve working class people’s lives and only seek to expand the Christian Nationalist state. In my lifetime, the Republican coalition has only been an anti-democracy party, one that imposes violent policies unpopular with the majority of people (e.g. abortion bans, tax cuts for corporations and the rich) through gerrymandering, voter suppression and packing the courts.
The leaders of Democratic coalition (i.e. Biden, Schumer, Pelosi) either fail to recognize this reality (unlikely) or like many other Democratic politicians (namely Manchin and Sinema), also choose militarism and corporatism and only provide scoldings to white supremacy in defense of capitalism. Some factions of the Democratic coalition (the Progressive Caucus, Justice Democrats, Democratic Socialists) recognized the perils of working class folks in America and sought to ensure the passage of both the American Jobs and Families Plans under budget reconciliation. Doing so would require no Republican votes in the Senate and would not require any negotiations with Republicans. Democrats could have passed many of the policies they have campaigned on since 2000. And why should the Democratic coalition feel compelled to negotiate any serious government policy? The Democratic coalition controls the House, Senate and Presidency. Almost the entirety of the federal pro-democracy coalition exists within the Democratic party. The Republican coalition represents a minority of Americans and is not a democratic (lowercase D) party.
And yet, five senators in the Democratic coalition, with the support a conservative Democratic Administration, decided to negotiate the American Jobs Plan with five Republican senators (who are constantly complicit with the fascism in their party) in the spirit of “bipartisanship” (i.e., maintaining “the white bipartisan power structure”). The result: Republicans eliminated $387 million for (public) housing and schools, $363 in clean energy tax credits, $400 million for in-home health care, cut public transit funding from $77 to $39 million and cut the Reconnecting Communities Act program from $25 billion to $1 billion (enough money to remove 2-3 Claiborne Expressways). Many of the cut and eliminated programs would be added to the Build Back Better Act, which for a while progressives in the House vowed to pass before the bipartisan infrastructure bill by withholding their “yes” vote.
Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, in November 2021 Biden capitulated to corporate Democrats and the corporate media by urging progressives to vote for the bipartisan infrastructure bill with the promise that the Build Back Better Act would pass (it did not). Only the Justice Democrats and Democratic Socialists in the House seemed to understand the staunch opposition of corporate Democrats in the Senate and corporate power in Washington to a climate, housing, healthcare, education, progressive taxation, etc. bill. These members kept to the strategy and voted “no” vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill in an attempt to give the Build Back Better Act a chance of passage (or as a political statement):
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) 🌹
Rep. Ilhan Omar (MN)
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (MA)
Rep. Cori Bush (MO) 🌹
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (NY) 🌹
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (MI) 🌹
The political news of the infrastructure bills was fresh on my mind as I walked under the Claiborne Expressway that day. I felt angry at how quickly the Democratic Administration I voted for abandoned the public policy it had championed months before. A fully-funded Reconnecting Communities Act program could have made measurable progress towards racial and transportation justice in American cities; instead, the Department of Transportation will award a few grants to cap freeways, add bus rapid transit lines and improve pedestrian safety improvements in a handful of cities. All the while, freeway expansion projects continue to threaten communities of color across the US like in South Carolina, Virginia and Texas. An expansion of the I-710 freeway in Los Angeles was only killed after years of activism from environmental justice groups. I remain hopeful thanks to the work of campaigns across the US fighting against freeway expansions and for their removal, like the Happy City Coalition in Los Angeles. We must continue to strive for the day when we live in a multiracial democracy with a government that removes intraurban freeways from our cities allowing us to look back on them as racist, destructive infrastructure for which communities in every American city are owed reparations.